Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Dressed for the Occasion

This photo taken Nov. 25, 2013 shows Isabelle Fontana, 7, working on two iPads for an e-book about Thanksgiving in her second grade classroom at Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington, Va. Isabelle was working on the text as a classmate made drawings to be photographed and inserted in the e-book. Needed to keep a school building running these days: Water, electricity _ and broadband. Interactive digital learning on laptops and tablets is, in many cases, replacing traditional textbooks. Students are taking computer-based tests instead of fill-in-the bubble exams. Teachers are accessing far-off resources for lessons. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

It was New Year’s Eve 2000, and Poor Elijah was stopping by on the way to his sister’s costume party. Since we’re talking about a character who wears riding boots and tails to Price Chopper, naturally I was curious. What would a man with the everyday fashion sense of General Custer wear to a masquerade?

Suddenly there he was in his Levis and corduroy sport coat. At first I was puzzled. “What are you supposed to be?”

“Who, me?” he replied. “Oh, nobody special. Just a man from the twenty-first century.”

I should have known. I’ve lived through enough New Year’s Eves and birthdays to realize that nothing momentous ever happens just because numbers change. That’s why I’m so tired of all the twenty-first century sermons and sales pitches.

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Remember New Year’s Eve 2000 when all the planet’s computers were supposed to curl up and die? What did you figure would happen when the ball dropped in Times Square?

Visionaries preach that technology is turning our present world upside down. But look back for a second to the last turn of a century. Consider the upheaval that generation saw – telephones, light bulbs, radios, phonographs, movies, antibiotics, automobiles, and airplanes, not to mention zippers and safety razors. Sing a song of silicon, but first tell me which was the real revolution. Which changed life more – emails and text messages that save us the trouble of talking on the phone or a day’s wait for Federal Express, or the airplane and telephone that reduced months and weeks to hours and minutes in the first place?

Which shook its generation most – Marco Polo’s gunpowder, Mr. Nobel’s dynamite, or Dr. Oppenheimer’s atom? This is a fool’s debate. Each was enough to turn its generation upside down.

They say that we live in a new global economy. They should read a little more about nineteenth century imperialism. They tell us everything changed after the Cold War. Except history records the fall of mightier empires. Vladimir Putin and Al Qaeda have nothing on Genghis Kahn and the Vikings.

I doubt my students’ future looms any more imposingly than my grandfather’s did. He grew up during World War I, came of age in the Roaring Twenties, and fed his children during the Depression so he could send them off to fight the Nazis. Then there was the Bomb, Milton Berle, world communism, civil rights, Neil Armstrong, and me. I’d say he had a lot to get used to.

Our perspective is off. We’re like children who think the three weeks until Christmas is an eternity. We each feel as if our brief span on earth were the pivotal moment in human history.

If you’ll pardon the narcissism, we’re the most excellent narcissists the world has ever seen.

A legion of experts choruses that we need to prepare our students for a different world from the one we face today.

When has this not been true?

This new world, they inform us, will require skills in problem solving, communication, and technology.

Excuse me, but is this supposed to mean the world has been rolling along without these things so far? What exactly do the experts figure the workers and citizens of the past and present have been doing on the job and with their lives?

Twenty-first century buffs love to quote A Nation at Risk, the report which explains how American education toughened up after Sputnik only to fall apart as schools “restructured” in the 1970s. Today’s reformers warn us that we face another crisis like the Space Race. The problem is they want us to prepare for that brave new world by adopting many of the same bankrupt restructured practices that A Nation at Risk blamed for our late twentieth century academic decline.

Vocational and technical programs do need modernization, but it doesn’t require any grand educational theory or Common Core rhetoric to accomplish this. Meanwhile, American teachers and students are staggering under the burden of recycled jargon, endless assessments, and twice-baked fallacies masquerading as a blueprint for the future.

Yes, my students will need technical skills that I don’t. But anyone who believes that the problem with schools is they aren’t preparing students for the twenty-first century needs to take a look at how students have been doing since the final decades of the twentieth. Because our most pressing problem isn’t that kids can’t “collaborate” and do calculus. Our problem is too many can’t sit still, add, and write a paragraph. Reading, writing, and fractions are skills for any century. Knowing how we gained our independence and how the earth revolves around the sun is knowledge for any century. Anyone who tells you that talking computers and iPhones will somehow make learning those skills and that knowledge obsolete is a fool.

Where does achievement come from?

Winston Churchill promised his people only blood, toil, tears, and sweat. This is a truth and a lesson for today and tomorrow, for us and for our children, at home and in the classroom.

The change in the calendar isn’t nearly as fateful as the change in ourselves.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.

About the Author

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.